Want to use a phone number? You better pay!

Sometimes Google is really frustrating. They slowly twist and turn things into their favor and if something could make them money, they force you to use it. Today I was reminded of one of their “features” – phone number extensions in AdWords. You select an option on your ad to include your phone number and have to pay if someone clicks it. Cool, right? Well, kind of. In order to push people to use and pay for that extension, Google prevents you from using a phone number in your ad text. If you want to have your phone number displayed, you’d better pay them for it!

“Don’t be evil” was Google’s motto which was conspicuously dropped by their parent company Alphabet. I guess that was a policy they just couldn’t subscribe to anymore.